Dive Brief:

• Olam Cocoa opened a new cocoa product development and innovation facility at llhéus, Brazil this month so that customers in South America will be able to experience collaborative product development, proof of concept and recipe refinement, according to a company statement.

• The company also launched a new sustainability program to promote Brazilian cocoa farmers.

• Olam works with a network of about 1,000 farmers across Brazil. They produce a large quantity of the company's beans, but 10 percent of processing also happens in the South American nation.

Dive Insight:

Already the producer of one of every three chocolate bars consumed in the world, Singapore-based Olam, has positioned itself to further grow and stabilize its cocoa business at a time when evolving climate change patterns necessitate ever-greater vigilance over growing practices with this new center in Brazil.

A U.S. Department of Energy report issued in June noted that inadequate understanding of “the functions, identities, quantities, and seasonal patterns of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) emissions in Amazon forests” makes it hard to predict how rising global temperatures might affect crops in Brazil’s cocoa-growing areas and other places. By putting its own researchers and product developers on the ground there, Olam is proactively addressing what could become, in a relatively short period of time, a serious crop-related issue.

Named last year as Food Engineering Magazine’s 31st largest food-and-beverage company in the world — the  first time Olam made that list — it’s understandable that the company would invest heavily to maintain and even grow its already-strong position in the world’s cocoa marketplace.